Kyoto Tech Meetup: January 2026 wrap-up
Updates from our morning coffee and hack day events last month. Also, this month's schedule.
January was a busy month for the Kyoto Tech Meetup. Across the month, we held:
- 1 Community Hack Day
- 4 Morning Tech & Coffees
This was the first month that we started alternating weekly morning coffees between Thursday and Saturday. It seems to be working so we'll stick with that for February as well.
January's Community Hack Day
We put more of an emphasis on community projects for this Hack Day. On the website repo, we got 5 PRs in, including:
- Updated favicon
- Google Tag Manager
- Google Maps
- Google Forms (for contact)
I don't think we planned for this to be a Google-themed day, but we somehow landed on it.
We also got new ideas for the site and some documented suggestions on how to improve for our target audience. There's a new effort for building a Discord bot for the meetup as well.
Our next Community Hack Day is scheduled for Sat, Feb 28: join us!
Topics from the morning coffees
I'm not sure why, but writing link posts weekly has been a challenge for me, so I'm giving you all the links I caught from our coffee sessions this month in one go.
AI / ML / Emerging Tech
- actu-al.co
https://actu-al.co/ - Moltbot
https://www.moltbot.dev/ - Prometheus MCP server
https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus - AI Engineer (YouTube)
https://www.youtube.com/@aiDotEngineer - Article: "US vs China: How to Win the Wrong Way"
https://platforms.substack.com/p/us-vs-china-how-to-win-the-wrong - Article: "The Japanese AI Boom Needs A Little More Ambition"
https://asianometry.passport.online/member/episode/the-japanese-ai-boom-needs-a-little-more-ambition- Companion video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_ZXSUxQF-Y
- Companion video
Web / App Development
- Astro
https://astro.build/ - Auth stuff
- Clerk
https://clerk.com/ - Authlete
https://www.authlete.com/
- Clerk
- IndieWeb
https://indieweb.org/
Ideas and mental models
- Mastermind groups
https://circle.so/blog/mastermind-groups - Luck surface area
https://modelthinkers.com/mental-model/surface-area-of-luck
Media Picks
- Kyoto, In Sound podcast and tours
https://www.kyotoinsound.com/ - Ephemeral social apps
- Minutiae
https://minutiae-app.org/ - BeReal
https://bereal.com/
- Minutiae
What's on in February
At this point in time, we have 4 meetups scheduled for this month:
- Morning Tech & Coffee on Thursday, February 5, 2026
- Morning Tech & Coffee on Saturday, February 14, 2026
- Morning Tech & Coffee on Thursday, February 19, 2026
- Community Hack Day, February 28, 2026 (venue partner FabCafe Kyoto)
Hope to see you at one!